While the Colonel finished jotting the memo, McKay glanced at the Royal Navy officer. The man sat stiff, with a heavy face too young for jowls but beginning to suggest them. This man was the guest lecturer, as McKay thought of it.
Three officers oversaw every briefing—the Colonel, McKay’s superior; the Major, head of operations for the Colonel; and a third officer, always different, always a representative of some other group within the OSS or another special operations unit entirely. There were scads of them, across dozens of separate special operations executives and intelligence groups working for every Allied country. These were the guest lecturers. McKay knew they were relevant to the mission briefings—probably intelligence or liaison officers of some kind—but they never spoke or otherwise contributed, just haunted the briefing as if ready to correct the other men or divine weakness in McKay himself. McKay usually forgot they were there by the middle of the briefing, and never saw them a second time. He would forget the Commander like all the others.
The Colonel sat up, took a last look at his memo, and flicked it to the Major. He looked at McKay.
“Now, Captain. What do you know about Norway?”
The Colonel’s questions had nonplussed McKay at first. He had grown used to them, but never had the Colonel asked about a specific place before—that always came later.
“Pretty good bit, sir, but I’m not sure how much of it’s relevant.”
“How so?”
“Most of what I know about Norway is historical,” McKay said. “The sagas. Vikings.”
“Ah.”
McKay grinned. “Afraid I can’t help you much past the twelfth century.”
The Colonel nodded. “And mountain climbing?”
The Colonel did love his sudden changes in direction.
“I’ve done a little of it, just around mountains back home.”
“What kind of climbing?”
“Scaling rock faces mostly,” McKay said. “There’s a couple of pretty rocky mountains in my county. They make for good climbing. Good views up there. One of them’s the second tallest mountain in Georgia.”
“Cliffs all the way up?”
“No, sir, just off the back side of it. Just enough to fiddle around on with some rope and hiking boots. I’ve also done some abseiling in Tallulah Gorge. Deepest canyon east of the Mississippi—lot of big cliffs there. That’s probably the most serious climbing I’ve done.”
“That’s fine. Now, how’s your German?”
“Fine, sir.”
The Major leaned forward and looked down the length of the desk at the Commander. “Captain McKay just got back from Germany.”
The British officer raised his eyebrows and nodded.
“Do you speak any Norwegian?” the Colonel said.
“No, sir, not at all, but I reckon I can pick up a little. It is Germanic, after all. I’ve picked up enough Danish to get by before. Depends on how long I’m there.”
The Colonel nodded and furrowed his brow. He neared the point McKay always anticipated, tried to ready himself for—the bald statement of his next assignment. McKay waited. The Colonel sat back in his chair and said, “McKay, what do you know about dams?”
McKay came from Rabun County, Georgia, the northeastern corner of the state, a redoubt of the Appalachians curtained from the rest of the South by forest, river, and hill country. His home country had lots of nicknames—the backwoods, the sticks, cow country, the middle of nowhere. His people had even more—hicks, rubes, hayseeds, bumpkins, crackers, local yokels, hillbillies. In a country whose educated elite sneered at what they thought a backward and uncivilized South, Southerners sneered at the backward and uncivilized hillbillies. But they needed electricity, and the mountains—which Low Country Southerners regarded, between trips to view the scenery, as the enemies of civilization and literacy—could provide it. The mountains streamed with rivers, which cut gorges and falls and choke points through the rock, perfect for hydroelectric dams. His home county alone had four, and McKay, during his college days, had visited and worked at every one.
He took his time with the three large photos the Major had handed him. All showed the same dam, one at a point late in its construction, the dam a hive of effort. Laborers worked in gangs hauling dirt, pouring concrete, and hauling machinery by mule team and main strength. The dam, not yet bracing a lake, looked like a wall between two rocky cliffs. Two level areas crowded with wooden buildings lay at each end of the dam—housing for dam personnel, toolsheds, offices, probably latrines. On the far side of the gorge workers were filling, by muscle and machine, a deep gash in the ground behind the dam.
McKay tapped the photo there. “Intake for the hydro turbines?”
The Colonel nodded.
McKay slipped the print behind the others. The second was an aerial photo. The dam stood complete, a deep lake swollen behind its wall. Dark water covered the gash for the pipeline intake. The concrete had darkened enough to suggest to McKay that this photograph had been taken at least a decade after construction. In place of the wooden cabins and shacks, permanent buildings of stone or brick stood in neat clusters at both ends of the dam. The aerial angle afforded a better view of the surroundings—sheer cliffs, mountains, scrubby vegetation, and not another building in sight. More interesting, a bridge spanned the gorge below the dam. At each end, rail track bored through the cliff walls of the gorge.
McKay looked at the third photo. It was soft and grainy—McKay guessed that it had been enlarged from miniature filmstock, the kind used in concealable cameras, and manipulated through multiple prints in the dark room to give an exposure where very little had been captured. The photo showed the dam from the ridgeline above. There were more buildings in this photo than in the previous one. He could not tell for certain, but a pair of long buildings on the far side of the dam looked like barracks. A radio aerial rose above a third building, the largest. Numerous small, dark figures stood about.
“I reckon this is the most recent photo?” McKay said.
The Colonel nodded again.
“That’s the dam at Grettisfjord,” he said. “It’s a hydroelectric complex that powers the Narvik area.”
“Narvik?”
“That’s right.”
Narvik lay 140 miles north of the Arctic Circle, under continuous night for most of the winter. When the Nazis invaded three years before, the British and Norwegians had held out there long after the rest of the country had fallen. Dug into the mountains and fjords, the British, Norwegians, and even some Poles had beaten the Nazis back, but the Nazis had hemmed them in, pounded them. The dueling navies coated the bottom of the fjords with wreckage. In the end, the Nazis forced the Allies to evacuate by sea—not long after Dunkirk, but without the fanfare, and with the fleet harried across the North Sea by the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. Narvik had remained a major Nazi naval base ever since. McKay looked at the photos again and shifted uncomfortably in his chair.
“What can you tell us, judging from these photographs?”
McKay flipped through them again, talking while he did.
“It’s an arch dam. Pretty common design, and not too different from the kind in the States from what I can see. That intake there feeds a pipeline through the mountains, but I don’t see a hydro station in any of these pictures.”
“Major?” the Colonel said.
“It’s on the other side of the northern cliffs,” the Major said. “Not too far from the dam.”
“You work on anything like that before, Captain?”
“Tallulah Dam,” McKay said. “Back home, in Georgia. Arch dam, like this. It’s at the top end of the gorge I mentioned. Intake feeds hydro turbines through more than two miles of underground pipeline. But this dam is big—bigger than Tallulah for sure, probably bigger than any dam I’ve worked on. I reckon a thousand feet wide at the top.”
“That’s about right,” the Major said. “We don’t have exact figures, though.”
McKay held up the most recent p
hotograph and pointed at the new buildings. “Barracks?”
“Probably,” the Colonel said.
“What kind of garrison?”
“Uncertain,” the Major said. “The krauts have all kinds of second-stringers they use for rearguard duty like this, but you never know. Plan like they’re Waffen SS.”
“Yes, sir.” McKay said. “I reckon that’s all we have on the dam?”
The Colonel nodded.
“The most recent photo is from a contact in the area, smuggled out through Shetland. We requested all we could get on the dam from King Haakon’s government-in-exile and those other two were all they could scrounge up. We have a few rough diagrams of the dam and its facilities, and a map of the area, but that’s it. That’s why we needed a man who knows dams.”
McKay, nodded, flipped through the prints once more and looked up. “May I ask what this is about, sir?”
The Colonel folded his hands and took a deep breath, less a sigh than a man about to dive into deep water after something he had lost. He did not begin where McKay expected.
“The invasion of northern Europe is set for late Spring,” the Colonel said. “We’ll probably land in France. When the time comes, we’ll have plenty to do there in the way of sabotage, ambushes, and preparing the way for the conventional forces. In the meantime, and in accordance with our ongoing objectives, we are creating as much trouble as possible on the outer fringes of Hitler’s empire. This dam—this part of Norway—is about a far away as you can get from where the real action is—or, will be. And the more Nazi resources we can tie down in out of the way places, the better our chances for breaching Fortress Europe.”
McKay nodded.
“So it’s a sabotage mission?”
“Blow up the dam.”
McKay said nothing. He always felt two things in the moment that the Colonel stated the objective of a new assignment—excitement and dread. This time he could not be sure which he felt the stronger.
After a moment, the Colonel said, “The Major has your itinerary.”
“Yes, first things first.” The Major opened a folder. “You and your team will fly north to the Shetland Islands, on the line London—Edinburgh—Inverness—the Orkneys—and Shetland. Keeps you over land most of the way, until you really have to cross open water. Don’t want to risk a lost team.”
McKay laughed. “Appreciate it.” He did.
“You’ll be landing at RAF Scatsta, a fighter base up there. There’s an airfield on the nearer end of the island but its runways are half the length we need for your transport. Again, don’t want a lost team, whether in the drink or smeared across a Shetland golf course.”
“Yes, sir. And from Shetland?”
“Coming to that. The Royal Navy has an operation in Shetland that has done some excellent work and certainly comes in handy now.”
McKay glanced at the Commander, who appeared to be listening but was also drumming his fingers slowly on one knee. That must be how the British figure into this, McKay thought. The Major continued.
“Norwegian resistance people have been running fishing boats back and forth across the North Sea to Shetland for some time now. It’s mainly used for smuggling weapons and equipment in and getting people the Nazis want out. That’s how we’re getting you in. But first—a Royal Navy sub called Viking will pick you up off Shetland and bring you seven hundred miles from there to the Norwegian coast off Narvik, which is where one of our fisherman friends will rendezvous with the sub and bring you into the country. Your main contact is Josef Petersen—I have a little about him in the file for you. You’ll plan the attack on the dam with Petersen and his men and execute it accordingly.”
“Our escape route?”
“The same,” the Major said. “Viking will patrol off the Norwegian coast doing naval reconnaissance while your assignment is underway. You can make arrangements by radio for your departure. As soon as the dam is blown, leave on Petersen’s fishing boat and meet the sub. The cover of darkness should help.”
“Yes, sir.”
McKay looked down at the photographs in his hands. The glossy prints were fogged at the edges, under his sweaty palms. He wiped them with the back of his hand and held the photos with the tips of his fingers.
“Does this have something to do with the heavy water production the Nazis were doing?”
Allied special operations had spent much of the last year sabotaging Nazi research at a hydro plant in southern Norway—informants, smuggled intelligence, commando teams brought in by glider and parachute, and a nighttime infiltration of the plant. Their efforts had culminated just a few weeks before with a bombing mission that damaged but did not destroy the plant. McKay knew little about heavy water other than that producing it was a preliminary chemical step in building powerful weaponry.
“There’s nothing like that going on at Grettisfjord. We just want the dam destroyed.”
“Sir, if you don’t mind my asking—”
Then the Commander, bestirring himself at the end of the long desk, did something that surprised McKay. He spoke.
“Now, see here, Captain—McKay, is it?”
McKay blinked, nodded. The Colonel and the Major stared at the Commander.
“Captain McKay, we selected you for this business on the basis of your mountaineering and German abilities, as well as some other credentials I’d like know more about. Your engineering credentials, actually.”
The Commander was like something from a movie—the stuffy Englishman. He spoke the word actually with a prickly aristocratic chop on the C.
“Yes, sir.”
“Captain,” The Colonel said, “this is Commander Bagwell of His Majesty’s Navy. And Commander, Captain McKay is one of our finest men. There’s—”
“Without doubt, Colonel, but I’m unused to knowing nothing about the men I’m sending out on business like this and do not believe we can abide it any longer.” The Colonel sat back. He was not accustomed to interruptions during his briefings. McKay thought he was probably too shocked that the Englishman had spoken to pull rank and take control of the briefing, but that peace would soon pass. The Commander consulted a file lying open on the desk and arched his brows. McKay imagined him reading a wine list, and suppressed a smile.
“Now, then, Captain,” the Commander said. “You studied engineering at Clemson College? Where is that?”
“Yes, sir. It was required. And South Carolina, sir.”
“Required. But you went on to study history elsewhere?”
“Yes, sir,” McKay said. “After graduation I started a graduate degree in history at the University of Georgia, but didn’t finish up.”
The Commander looked up. “Why?”
“I wanted to join the Marines.”
“Ah, yes, of course. Which reminds me—what about your malaria?”
McKay stiffened and said nothing. He clenched one fist, out of sight, in his lap.
“I see. Returning to your engineering qualifications—”
“McKay is more than qualified enough to blow something up, dammit” the Colonel said. “Illiterate French Reds have been doing that for the last three years.”
“Colonel, permission to speak,” McKay said.
The Colonel waved a hand at him. “Of course.”
“My marks in engineering and mathematics at Clemson were barely passing. The… Commander may have a point, if this assignment includes anything complex—”
Commander Bagwell cut him off.
“Whether you succeed or not, whether Jerry spends his time and energies rebuilding a dam or merely augmenting what forces he has in the far north, you’ll have done a bloody good job.”
McKay did not like that—not just the way the Commander said it, but the substance. Satisfaction with second best, which was always synonymous with failure to McKay, usually meant getting nowhere near the best. Failure was not acceptable—a failed job could never be a bloody good one. Failure on these jobs meant never failing at anything again.
The Colonel’s face had turned red, his posture stiff.
“Commander, we selected McKay for a very particular set of credentials, and engineering is about the least important of them.”
“Oh, without doubt. I—”
“That’ll be all, Commander,” the Colonel said and, before a reply could come, “What we need is leadership. McKay succeeds at what he does, and we’ve got an excellent team to go with him.”
The Commander slouched, raised his eyebrows, muttered something like, “One should hope so,” and the Colonel ignored him.
McKay ignored him, too. “Anyone from OG, sir?”
“Unavailable,” the Colonel said. McKay felt his first sense of real foreboding at this news. The operational group was full of native-born and first-generation Scandinavians, men who still spoke the languages and knew the customs. He knew and trusted a few of them—they were reliable men. With none available, he would have to rely on his German and the second languages of the men on his team. Hiding, blending in, if necessary, would be much harder. McKay showed nothing of his disappointment or unease.
“Who have you picked, sir?”
“Just two,” the Colonel said. “You have your own choice of a third.” He waved the Major around the desk again and the Major handed McKay two sheets. A small portrait photo was clipped to each. “We picked men who have a few things in common. Experience with mountainous terrain, especially in snow, fluent German, a modicum of engineering or demolition experience. Especially as it relates to dams. You know Sergeant Graves?”
Colour Sergeant Watkin Graves was the man in the top photograph, a bull-necked, cold-eyed, smirking man in a dark beret.
Dark Full of Enemies Page 2
